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The Strangers
In a paranoid nation on the other side of the world a young man named Noon is caught vandalizing posters of the Beloved President. Nearer by, Oon trawls designer shops hoping to find just the right shirt to wear to an upcoming gig. Noona and friends screen their low-budget film at hat shops and dive bars, hoping for a break. And Oona works a missing-persons case on a giant cruise ship. In Eugene Lim's beautifully bizarre new novel, multiple sets of strange twins explode or drift or otherwise come apart and yet, like entangled quanta, continue to speak impossibly to one another.
What an astonishing book! Beautiful, original, with delicious surprises lurking at the heart of sentences, of events, of all the engines of communication.
–Harry Mathews
THE STRANGERS is like a cabinet of curiosities put together by Georges Perec and Andrei Biely, hilarious and utterly seductive, a sharp commentary on the social and political architecture we cling to at our peril. And yet, while pulling the rug out from under the reader, Eugene Lim’s book is a total pleasure.
–Susan Daitch
Beautifully written, so precise and accurate to real life that it is (fantastically) convincing, Eugene Lim’s THE STRANGERS, with its multiple interwoven strands, reveals one surprising character and relationship after the next, and culminates in a skilfully devised and satisfying resolution. A fascinating and engrossing tale.
–Lydia Davis
What an astonishing book! Beautiful, original, with delicious surprises lurking at the heart of sentences, of events, of all the engines of communication.
–Harry Mathews
THE STRANGERS is like a cabinet of curiosities put together by Georges Perec and Andrei Biely, hilarious and utterly seductive, a sharp commentary on the social and political architecture we cling to at our peril. And yet, while pulling the rug out from under the reader, Eugene Lim’s book is a total pleasure.
–Susan Daitch
Beautifully written, so precise and accurate to real life that it is (fantastically) convincing, Eugene Lim’s THE STRANGERS, with its multiple interwoven strands, reveals one surprising character and relationship after the next, and culminates in a skilfully devised and satisfying resolution. A fascinating and engrossing tale.
–Lydia Davis
213 pages, Paperback
First published November 12, 2013
1 person is currently reading
211 people want to read
About the author
Eugene Lim
16 books301 followersEugene Lim is the author of the novels Fog & Car (Ellipsis Press, 2008; Coffee House Press 2024), The Strangers (Black Square Editions, 2013; Coffee House Press 2026), Dear Cyborgs (FSG Originals, 2017), and Search History (Coffee House Press, 2021). His writings have appeared in The New Yorker, The Believer, The Baffler, Granta, Dazed, Little Star, The Denver Quarterly, The Brooklyn Rail, Your Impossible Voice, Vestiges and elsewhere. He is the librarian at Hunter College High School, runs Ellipsis Press, and lives in Jackson Heights, NY.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
October 2, 2013
Stories within stories, life in a totalitarian state, drama amidst underground filmmakers, foul play on an ocean liner...there's a lot going on here, and that's not even getting into the multiple sets of siblings that populate this novel. Much like Lim's previous novel, the excellent FOG & CAR, there's a whole lot to admire here.
October 3, 2016
This was the only book I bought at the recent Brooklyn Book Festival. I made a good choice. What made this novel for me was the author’s incredible ear for prose. His sentences are among the finest I’ve seen from younger American fiction writers.
I was also very taken with the way Lim had characters pop into the novel and tell stories, one after the other. It’s somewhat like what I do in the novel I recently finished, and yet very different.
It’s these two characteristics of the novel that allow Lim to get away with a series of pieces that are held together in ways I found hard to follow, but which don’t really need to be followed to be enjoyed.
I was also very taken with the way Lim had characters pop into the novel and tell stories, one after the other. It’s somewhat like what I do in the novel I recently finished, and yet very different.
It’s these two characteristics of the novel that allow Lim to get away with a series of pieces that are held together in ways I found hard to follow, but which don’t really need to be followed to be enjoyed.
August 25, 2014
"Our lives were the movies to our movies."
March 19, 2025
This is the second book I’ve read by Eugene Lim, and it will definitely be the last. I read it as fast as I could purely to get it over with. I will say this was SLIGHTLY better than Fog & Car, in that it actually seemed to have a plot for maybe 1/3 of the book.
What baffles me is that there are parts of the book that read as self aware of its pretentiousness, yet it continues on and on and on. It reads like a child trying to use all the most impressive phrases and words they know while not actually saying anything at all.
It’s unfortunate, also, because the premise — just like Fog & Car — is very interesting. And it feels like Lim is making a conscious choice to write badly, because there are parts of the book that were genuinely engaging. I just don’t get it.
What baffles me is that there are parts of the book that read as self aware of its pretentiousness, yet it continues on and on and on. It reads like a child trying to use all the most impressive phrases and words they know while not actually saying anything at all.
It’s unfortunate, also, because the premise — just like Fog & Car — is very interesting. And it feels like Lim is making a conscious choice to write badly, because there are parts of the book that were genuinely engaging. I just don’t get it.
December 17, 2013
"I think you're about to be ejected out of here and thrown into a parallel universe." This novel (Full disclosure: the author is a friend, one of my oldest and best) is so full of pleasurable language, its twisty, puzzling connections feel like comforts, despite its utter originality and strangeness. Full of sentences that linger on the brain, strung like gems, "I've converted the paranoia I'd read about into a narcissism..." Twinning mysteries abound, holographic, hermetic, doubling "Spooky Action..." at intimate distances.
January 6, 2014
Friggin excellent!
February 6, 2015
engaged w/ it here: http://www.5cense.com/15/412.htm
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews